1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for flow control within a digital communications network. In particular, this invention is related to systems and methods for performing service differentiation regarding the treatment of packets within a network device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Over the last several years, the Internet has grown into an enormous network to which virtually any large or small computer network may be connected. Thus, the unprecedented growth of Internet users has placed even greater demands on the current Internet infrastructure, especially resources of a network that are shared by multiple network devices. For example, switches, routers and hubs are resources that are shared among a network to assist in transferring packets from one network device to another network device. Unfortunately, the buffer memory and the bandwidth of these shared devices have a limited amount of resources that must be allocated among these competing network devices. Thus, in order to prevent starvation of any particular network device, a network typically provides a service differentiation priority scheme such as class of service (CoS) to allocate these shared resources among the competing network devices.
Competition for these shared resources may occur at both the input ports and the output ports of a network device. Competition for entry into the network device may occur at the input ports due to congestion. Namely, when packets are transmitted to a receiver, the receiver might not be able to process the incoming packets at the same speed as the sender transmits the packets. Therefore, the receiver may need to store the incoming packets in a buffer to temporarily hold the packets until the packets can be processed. However, since buffers are created to hold a finite amount of data, a buffer overflow may occur when the packets entering the buffer exceeds the buffer's capacity. To prevent a buffer overflow from occurring, a buffer manager may decide to drop the last few packets of the incoming packets. The buffer manager must also make a service differentiation to determine which class or queue a packet should be dropped from when there is no available buffer space. To avoid congestion wherever possible a network may use conventional algorithms such as Random Early Detection (RED) or Early Random Drop (ERD) to drop the packets from the incoming queues, in proportion to the bandwidth which is being used by each network device.
At the output ports, competition over the bandwidth may also occur. Having enough bandwidth for packet transmissions has been a problem that has plagued many conventional network systems. If the traffic flow of the outgoing packets exceeds the available rate, the packets are typically dropped by the network, which adversely affects a network's quality of service (QoS). QoS is usually associated with a network being able to deliver time-sensitive information such as live video and voice while still having enough bandwidth to deliver other traffic. Prioritization, which is also referred to as class of service (CoS) or service differentiation, is a technique employed by some networks to identify traffic according to different classifications so that the traffic having a higher priority is delivered before lower-priority traffic.
One service differentiation scheduling mechanism that has been used to allocate the available bandwidth is Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) in conjunction with a “leaky bucket” to control the data flow between a network device, the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) and another device. The leaky bucket method involves configuring a network device to restrict the amount of information (i.e., packets) that a user may receive (e.g., via a port of the network device), by tokenizing the information and setting a threshold.
Thus, the network device must determine whether there are enough credits in the token bucket for a packet to be sent or whether that packet must be delayed. To ensure that the network device uses the WFQ to transmits packets according to the bandwidth policy established in the service level agreement (SLA), the network may establish specified rate parameters for receiving and transmitting the packets. The manner in which these parameters are established and controlled directly influences the network's ability to monitor, manage and control traffic flow having multiple classes of services.
Accordingly, new and improved systems and methods for establishing the operating parameters that govern the service differentiation applied to multiple CoS's as packets are transmitted by a network device are needed.